Gartner Predicts Half of Enterprises Will Drop AI Assistants by 2028

Gartner predicts that by 2028, over half of all enterprises will stop paying for assistive intelligence tools like copilots, AI assistants, and smart advisors that help people perform manual tasks and support decision making.

The reason? A fundamental shift in how AI works is coming. According to Gartner VP Analyst Alastair Woolcock, software is changing from a tool used by people to get work done, to people "supervising intelligent systems that execute on their behalf."

This change is driven by new agentic capabilities being rolled out by large language model providers designed to help "enterprises build, deploy and manage AI agents," as described in services like OpenAI Frontier.

Which Areas Will See Changes First

Woolcock says this disruption will first impact "IT service management, legal and compliance, procurement, CRM and revenue operations and selected ERP domains, markets anchored in repeatable, rule-based workflows agents can increasingly execute autonomously."

Gartner also ranked vendors who provide solutions for customer support and service operations as very highly exposed to possible displacement within the next 18 months if they "fail to embed delegated execution" — the ability for people to offload work onto AI agents.

How the Technology Works

In this emerging paradigm of digital labor, "human roles will shift, not disappear," according to Woolcock. The new systems use agent orchestration, where one AI agent orchestrates the activity of sub-AI agents to accomplish work. Examples include ServiceNow's AI Control Tower, Salesforce's multi-orchestration, and Talkdesk's multi-agent orchestration.

Most platforms with agentic AI capabilities offer an orchestrator agent, though the specifics vary. Model Context Protocol (MCP) has emerged as the default way for AI agents to access internal tools and data in third-party platforms, with MCP servers sitting at the "edge" of these platforms.

What Vendors Should Do

Woolcock advises vendors can improve their competitive advantage by embedding "agent orchestration into systems of record, [exposing] policy-aware execution APIs, and [enforcing] identity, permissions, and audit at the control plane."

He cautions SaaS vendors against closing their "systems of record to preserve control," suggesting that competitive advantage will come from "controlled openness" through direct integrations and MCP access. "Those relying on restriction risk being bypassed by orchestration layers enterprises trust more."